Hi all,
I just merged a PR to update the AUTHORS file:
https://github.com/sympy/sympy/pull/21881
This is something that I've needed to do before each release and is
quite time consuming so in that PR I also added the scripts that check
the AUTHORS file to the CI tests. Now any PR that does not have up to
date author information will fail in CI. In particular this means that
any new contributor will need to add their name to the AUTHORS file
before their first PR can be merged.
The name and email address in the AUTHORS file needs to match up with
the name/email in the git commits (as set by git config). Otherwise
there will need to be a line in the .mailmap file associating the
name/email in the authors file with the name/email in the commits. The
most common reason this is needed is if someone makes commits through
the github web UI which will always record a no reply email address.
This will be problematic for new contributors but it means that the
author information will always be up to date and will be more accurate
since anyone contributing will be required to specify the name and
email address up front.
The simple instruction for any new contributor is that you should
first set your name and email address in your git config:
$ git config --global user.name "John Doe"
$ git config --global user.email john...@example.com
See e.g.:
https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Getting-Started-First-Time-Git-Setup
If git is correctly configured in all of the commits then the sympy
git repo has two scripts that can be used to check and update the
author information. The first is
$ bin/mailmap_update.py
This extracts all name/email combinations from all commits in the repo
and checks that every email address is mapped to a unique name. If
there are two commits with the same email addresses but different
names then a mailmap line is needed to specify which name is the one
that should be used in the authors file. Likewise if the same name is
used with multiple email addresses then a mailmap line is needed to
specify which email address should go with the name. (I'm not sure how
to handle genuinely distinct people who actually have the same
name...).
If there are no errors reported by mailmap_update.py then the second
script can be used to update the AUTHORS file:
$ bin/authors_update.py
This also extracts all name/email combinations from commits and then
runs them through the mapping in mailmap and then if any are not
listed in the authors file the script will add them. It will print
something to say what it has done. You can use git diff to see the
changes. These changes in .mailmap and AUTHORS need to be committed
and pushed.
I expect some new contributors will find this difficult especially
since they might not discover that their git config has the wrong
name/email until after they have already made the commits and pushed
them. It will reduce the chances that someone accidentally uses the
wrong git config though (once your commits are merged to master this
is no way to remove them even if you do not want that name/email to be
used publicly). The simple fix is just to add some lines to .mailmap
but many contributors might prefer to actually fix their config and
redo the commits. In general I would rather have correct name/email
information recorded in the commits than have a .mailmap entry that
disambiguates them.
Lastly whenever we have changes to CI like this there is a risk that a
PR that has already passed CI will be merged resulting in CI failure
on the master branch that then prevents any PRs from being merged
until it gets fixed. CI can be rerun for a PR by closing and
reopening.
--
Oscar
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